Finis
by MizJoely
Summary: How exactly was Dana Scully able to conceive, anyway? Sort of negated by final season, but I'd rather negate that season all together.


_Author's Note: As you can probably tell by the summary for this story, this should probably be considered alternate universe story as it takes off from that glorious kiss at the end of Season 8 and ignores virtually all of Season 9, including Mulder's abrupt leavetaking at the end of the first episode of that season (which, for the record, I felt should have just dealt with Dogget & Reyes, whom I enjoyed watching and whose episodes were the best of that season). Hopefully none of this scares you off!_

The letter arrived six days after the quiet wedding ceremony, no return address, no postage, slipped quietly under the apartment door to be discovered by Dana Scully after feeding her son and putting him to bed.

She stared at it for a long moment before reaching trembling fingers to pluck it from the floor. Anonymous missives had been passed to her before, some helpful, some dangerous, all belonging to the life she and her husband had deliberately walked away from months after the birth of their son, when the danger was believed over and they were able to finally, finally be together. To be a family.

This letter could change all that.

She knew that, and therefore hesitated to open it. Part of her wanted to shove it into the garbage can and forget about it, ignore it and pray it wasn't the harbinger of yet another conspiracy against her family, but the other part of her, the part that had been honed to hyper-awareness after nine years with the X-Files, insisted she open it.

She slit it open with a pen knife, glancing worriedly at the bedroom door. If this heralded some new intrusion into their life, a disruption of the domestic tranquility they'd fallen into only recently, then her husband needed to know about it. But the name on it said "Dana Scully" and no other, so she opened it, reasoning that she could always share it with him later, if necessary. A small voice whispered that of course it would be necessary, but she ignored it as best she could.

Later, of course, he would scold her for her recklessness, reminding her it could have been a letter bomb or poisoned, but she shut him up by telling him that she'd followed her instincts, and since she was unscathed, it meant those instincts had proven solid. But that was later. For now, there was the letter.

And that was, indeed, all the plain brown envelope held. Several sheets of paper, closely and neatly written. By hand. Not typed, not processed on a computer, but written in blue ink on sheets of paper torn from a notebook. "My dear Dana" it began.

_"My dear Dana,_

_"I call you that knowing that you would prefer I address you as Agent Scully, but illness and contemplation of my own mortality permit me to address you in a more familiar fashion. Yes, cigarette smoking has finally accomplished what you and Mulder and so many others have failed to do: it has brought me to acknowledge that I, like every other mortal being, must someday die._

_"From that paragraph, you know who this letter is from, but I promise you; discarding it now will leave the final mystery of your life unsolved."_

She stopped reading, clutching the letter tightly to her breast as she struggled suddenly for breath. She'd been holding it carefully by the edges in case a need for fingerprints arose, but now it was balled in her fist, edges sticking between her tightly clenched fingers as if it sought escape from the imprisonment of her hands. Again her eyes sought the bedroom door, only to be drawn unwillingly back to the letter. Reluctantly, half-fearful and half-furious, she continued.

_"Thus I urge you to continue, to hear me out, as it were. Then you can decide what to do with the knowledge I give you, freely and without cost._

_"If you are reading this, a unique combination of events has occurred, the first being my death, at which I am quite certain you will shed no tears, and the second being the successful birth of your first child._

_"I say first with confidence, since I know that there may be others. May be, not will be; may be' as in it will ultimately be your choice, not one that is forced on you._

_"Just as the birth of this child was not because of something that was forced on you. Rather, it was a gift. My gift to you."_

Another ragged breath, but she forced her eyes to return to the words although the bile threatened to rise in her throat and her stomach roiled in protest at the implication of those words. Was he daring to claim that he was--but no, she couldn't bring herself to finish the thought. Not without reading the rest.

_"You remember a certain computer disk that my associates and I sought, and how we used you to bring down one we viewed as a threat."_

She remembered, all right, and that memory still brought bitterness and the tang of defeat with it.

_"You awoke one morning, disoriented, concerned to find yourself in night clothes and me in the room. I tried to convince you that you had merely fallen so deeply asleep that you didn't wake as I carried you to your room, undressed you, put your pajamas on you, and then left. You reluctantly made a show of believing me, but you always suspected that something else had occurred; I could see it in your eyes. As time passed and nothing seemed to come of it, you let it go, or at least you never spoke of it to me._

_"Of course you were right. No one sleeps so deeply in the presence of a mortal enemy that they fail to awaken under those circumstances. I gave you something to keep you asleep while a medical team performed a procedure on you. Not to remove anything, as had been done to you in the past, or to destroy or injure you; quite the contrary._

_"I returned something to you. I know Agent Mulder found your ova; he was meant to find them. But what he didn't know was that they had been sterilized before he was allowed to take them. They were never meant to be anything more than a tantalizing clue, a distraction when we needed him distracted. If you attempted to have them fertilized, then you know by now that was a futile effort._

_"And yet you have given birth; the fact that you are reading this letter proves that beyond the shadow of a doubt. Now you begin to suspect what I have done to you, for you. And you wonder why._

_"It's very simple, Dana. I have grown quite fond of you over the years, as I have become equally fond of Mulder. Strange, I still can't bring myself to call him Fox. Can you? Your mother does, she acts as if it is perfectly normal to call the man by his first name. Do the two of you still refer to each other as Scully and Mulder?_

_"I ask only because I presume that the father of your child is Fox William Mulder. I suppose I could be wrong, but I am rarely wrong when it comes to reading people. And of course, I will never know the answer, since I am dead. Whether it is the cancer or some other means that will strike me down, I don't know; I don't pretend to see the future quite that clearly. But I do know that my time on this earth is quite limited, and in my final hours I feel the need to confess._

_"Not to repent; no, I still believe that what I did was in the best interest of mankind, no matter what the personal cost to either myself or Mulder. Or you. But I am glad that I was able to return one thing to you, something you never even knew you would miss until suddenly it was taken from you. And because of that one thing, I can go to my death easy in my conscience._

_"Implanting the eggs was easy for the group of doctors I had at my disposal, although they warned me that over half might not be viable. That was more than you had before the procedure, so I was content. As you should be content. Nor should you wrack your brains trying to discover how such a procedure could have been performed in such a short period of time with no accompanying physical discomfort afterwards; suffice it to say that the surgical techniques used were not...standard in the medical community. Allow yourself to accept 'extreme possibility' as the answer and leave it at that._

_"That is all the explanation you will receive, and by now I am beyond your reach, so no matter how much Mulder storms and swears he will obtain answers, he will once again be forestalled. Again, I offer no apologies, tender no repentance. I merely hope that you can be grateful to me for this one thing, and that you love your child--or children--as much as you love their father."_

It was unsigned; when she finished reading, Scully felt the papers slip from her nerveless fingers, heard the whisper of sound they made as they brushed against the hardwood floor and settled there.

"Scully?"

"Mulder." She felt her breath catch; they still called each other that, even six days after the wedding. Frightening that an old enemy knew them so well.

"What's wrong?" He'd seen the whiteness of her face; she watched his eyes flick to the papers lying so innocently on the floor, the brown envelope bearing only her name sitting on the edge of the small end table, the still-open pen knife perched next to it. "What happened?"

"Our miracle," she said simply, and reached out for him. He folded her into his embrace, puzzled, torn by the need to comfort her and the need to find out why she required comforting.

She picked up the letter and handed it to him, after a few moments spent in his arms, silently thanking God that she'd read the letter and not thrown it out. Because there had always been a nagging doubt in the back of her mind, a worry about her baby's true parentage that hadn't been eased by the events of the first six months of his life. Finally, those doubts and fears could be laid to rest.

She'd never expected to find a reason to be grateful to him, their oldest and deadliest foe. Just as she'd never expected to find happiness and fulfillment in marriage and motherhood. Especially not with the man who was currently going red in the face, but still reading the letter that had been anonymously deposited at their doorstep. But she had found the latter, and so she supposed she must accept the former.

Her husband deliberately crumpled the pages and just as deliberately dropped them back to the floor before bringing his eyes to meet hers. "Do you believe this?"

Scully nodded. "It makes perfect sense. Oh, I question his altruism, I'm sure he had an ulterior motive, but doubt him?" She shook her head. "Not at all. I believe that letter is the first truthful thing he's willingly told us."

Mulder nodded, frowning abstractedly until she reached up and forced his face down to hers for a lingering kiss. When their lips parted, they held each other closely as they finished the conversation. "Mulder, once I accepted that you had to be William's father, that our night together had resulted in his conception, then I had to accept that somehow my eggs had been re-implanted. Or that the doctors had been wrong and that not all of my eggs had been harvested. One of those possibilities had to be true."

"Which meant at some point you underwent a medical procedure, at least if it were the former and not the latter," Mulder concluded.

Scully nodded again. "For once, the logical and plausible scientific explanations were the ones that matched the facts." A smile broke out over her face. "For once, I was right."

Mulder pulled her closer and kissed the top of her head. "Scully, you have always been right," he murmured into her hair. "Right for me."

She laughed gently. "You are so lucky that I am still in post-marital bliss, mister, or that chauvinistic comment would be shoved back down your throat." She pressed her fingers to his lips when he seemed about to protest. "I accept the compliment and ignore the implication that I am not right in the other sense. I'm 95 percent sure you didn't mean it that way."

"We need to know who delivered this." Mulder returned reluctantly to the matter at hand. As one their gazes turned to the crumpled piece of paper on the floor. "It's too late for fingerprints, at least on the paper. Maybe on the envelope..."

"No."

Mulder looked at her in surprise. "But Scully, don't you want to know who delivered this? Shouldn't we try to find out if it's true, that he's dead?"

"No, and no," she replied firmly. "I don't care who delivered it, whether it be a legitimate messenger service or little green men in UFOs. Nor do I care if he's dead or alive. I am willing to feel grateful for what he claims to have done for me, for us, but that is the last emotion I ever want to spend on him."

Mulder blinked at the passionate conviction in her voice, and reconsidered his own knee-jerk reaction. Did he want to know the answer to those last questions, or was it merely habit? The "super soldiers" were no longer an issue, and the original conspiracy was as dead as their enemy claimed to be. The aliens were either coming or they weren't, and nothing he personally had done over the last 10 years had done more than delay that possible coming. Nothing he personally did now would likely affect the outcome if the aliens defeated their non-human enemies, and there were always Reyes and Doggett to help in the fight against that possible future if it came down to it.

The only future he was worried about, he realized in wonder, was the one contained in this apartment. The one with him, Scully, and their son.

For once, he decided, the truth could wait. Forever, if necessary.

There were other priorities in his life now.


End file.
